[ronbaby-x]

Just wanted to add that I feel a bit embarrassed now, for spouting off before I had really explored the whole of the XBMC 11.0 UI.

Apparently, something that looks like it could be close to what I was asking for (or suggesting) as regards to both (#2) a network manager tool and also (#4) something that could report about battery level on a laptop are already present in the current UI (but perhaps could use some tweeking).

Under Programs, I found something that claims to be a WiFi manager. I haven't really looked at it, but I plan to. if it works, and if it were expanded so as to allow management of _both_ wired and wireless connections, then that would be a Good Thing, IMHO. I my opinion also, something like this is too important to be burried under Programs, with a thousand other nick nacks. It should be under System someplace.

Also, under System (someplace, I forget exactly where now) there was something about System Status (or something like that). Anyway, there I was able to see some particulars about my setup, including how much memory was in use, and there was even a line that said Battery Level: XX%. Woo hoo! That's at least part of what I wanted. (I would prefer a friendly little battery icon, on-screen most of the time, like on my digital camera, and like in the Windows system tray.) Well anyway, at least the beginnings of something like that are there in the UI already. The only bad news is that in my case (on FreeBSD) the battery level consistantly is showing up as 0%. Hummm. Just a minor bug there. More work for me or else maybe for the official FreeBSD XBMC port maintainer.

[Memphiz]

The programs are addons and not part of xbmc core (settings and so on are core things - there is no settings addon api for hooking in addons there). Same for the ui - its a skin using the skin engine (xml + image based). The default skin you see is called confluence. On touch devices its called "touched" and already displays the battery indicator beside the clock...

[ronbaby-x]

OK, I think that I (sort of) understand.

So if I was really clever, I might figure out a way to borrow (steal?) the battery indicator from "touched" and get it to show up in Confluence, but if and only if the host device happens to be one that has a battery.

I'm sure that I am not that clever _yet_, but I plan to keep on trying to educate myself.

P.S. Are there any screen shots of touched laying around somewhere... you know... that would show its battery indicator and also the clock you speak of? If so, I'd like to look at those.

[Memphiz]

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=128494

hint you don't need to change c++ code for what you wanna do. Only xml and images.

[AndyE]

You have 30 years of UNIX experience, and you don't know how to access virtual terminals and return to the X session?

[ronbaby]

geeezzz

A bit of slack please? 90+% of my past experience is working on compilers, and then anti-(email)-spam stuff.

I did already know that if X got choked for some reason, that I could do Alt-F1 and ^C to kill it, but that's all I ever had a need to know... until now. And I knew that Alt-F2, Alt-F3, etc. could bring up various virtual terminals. I just never knew (until the past few days) that one could switch out/off X, i.e. by going to one of these virtual consoles, and then switch back to X via Alt-F9 (under FreeBSD at least... I don't know if that's the same under Linux cuz mostly I don't use that).

Do YOU know how to write a recursive descent parser? Do YOU know why Left Recursion might cause problems when used in a formal grammar from which one is trying to automatically derive a parser?

Just because I know only whatever little about X I have actually _needed_ to know in the past, and just because I know essentially nothing about user interfaces generally, that doesn't mean or imply that I just waltzed in here off the street or from behind a BestBuy cash register. (At this point I am tempted to trot out all of my qualifications and experience, but since that would only result in a pointless pissing match of no real relevance to this forum, I'll pass on that.)


P.S. In reply to Memphiz... I got no problem with writing some C++ code. Although do prefer C, because you can just look at it and *know* how it is going to be mapped down to machine code... at least to a first approximation. You can't do that always with C++... there's all this stuff going on under the covers. The implementation of multiple inheritance is a good example.